Back on January 14, 2006, a brash, young and talented developer named John Resig put out a personal project to the OSS world and hoped it could benefit *someone*. Little did he know that 3 years later, his side project would become one of the most influential frameworks for developing JavaScript-based applications. Today, the jQuery project turns 3 years old which, considering the churn rate for open source projects, is a monumental achievement. So it makes sense that on the project’s 3rd birthday, the team has announced the release of jQuery v1.3, the latest and greatest release of jQuery which includes the new Sizzle selector engine.

Along with the inclusion of Sizzle, jQuery v1.3 includes a bevvy of new features:

Live Events: Event delegation with a jQuery twist

jQuery Event Overhaul: Completely rewired to simplify event handling.

HTML Injection Rewrite: Lightning-fast HTML appending.

Offset Rewrite: Super-quick position calculation.

No More Browser Sniffing: Using feature detection to help jQuery last for many more years to come.

The biggest update though is that the jQuery projects (i.e. jQuery & jQuery UI) will be part of the Software Freedom Conservancy thus making the projects true non-profit endeavor and providing a number of benefits to both the project and the jQuery community including:

It allows the current project members to continue to manage the projects and maintain ultimate responsibility for the direction of current and future efforts.

It allows the projects to be considered a true non-profit efforts allowing us to be able to accept donations and contributions without incurring tremendous personal financial liability.

The copyright of the code will be assigned to the conservancy thus ensuring that no single person will own contributions or assets of the project.

It may allow corporations to write off time when an employee contributes to a project.

Most importantly, it ensures that the jQuery projects will always be open and free software

With so many new individuals & corporations contributing to the project, doing this became a big priority to protect the investments made by the jQuery community.

This is a lot of great news for jQuery developers and here’s wishing jQuery a happy 3rd birthday.

The API Browser, pasted a few days ago from Ext seems a lot better – to me. The API Browser from jQuery is agood start but some iterations are still needed. For example the order of the items, use of not-needed hover effects etc.

@jQuery guys, if you post graphs please provide units for both axis in the grafic.

I really like the Edit feature that integrates with jsbin, very cool idea…. By sheer coincidence it might turn up soon in the Dojo Explorer (just to throw my hat in the ‘great framework browser’ conversation – http://dojocampus.org/explorer) too :-)

Very exciting! I was particularly happy to see their mention of my project, flXHR, in the ‘Ajax’ section of the announcement. I’ve updated the code samples to use the new jQuery 1.3 approach, and written about the new harmony here: http://www.flensed.com/fresh/2009/01/jquery-13-and-flxhr-a-match-made-in-heaven/
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Moreover, the advances that jQuery has made, especially in performance, across the board are very impressive. Way to go, jQuery, and happy birthday!

As much as I love JQuery, and looking forward to 1.3, the API Browser is irritating me.

As a developer, I want to browse, scroll, see how things fit together, not click, click, click and see a few items at a time only.

A tree approach would have been much better than this accordion style.

ExtJS’s one cannot be compared since there are differences in the way these libraries operate. But at least there I can see properties, methods, events all on page. Here it is click, try to remember, click.

Yeah, I’m agreeing that using the API browser hurts. Problem with the accordion is I’m not always sure where the thing I want is. I want to be able to open as many of them as I want and close them at my leisure.
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An example–The tree control on the left here:
.http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AIR/1.5/devappshtml/